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Detroit's population is down by about 2/3rds from its peak; it's tax base is probably down even more since at it's peak the US car makers had almost the entire US auto market.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

A club I'm a member of is considering moving their web site to a new host. The one they are currently considering is http://www.siteground.com/[^]. Does anyone have any experience with SiteGround?

FYI the current site is at http://clarc.org/[^]. It's a Joomla-based site hosted on a Linux box and currently is giving some problems due to conflicting file and directory permissions on a shared domain machine. If we set all the directory permissions to everyone has access to everything, then it works fine, but is wide open to hackers. (Currently it gets a few hundred hack attempts each day.)

So my friend who's about to start his own company asked me if I am willing to take one of his projects, which is a small Android app. I told him that although I code in C# and while it may be similar with Java, I have no background on Android development,so the learning curve can be a factor on the deliverables/deadlines since I will be doing it after my day job.

The first thing that I did was to go through the training on Android's developer website. I even downloaded a free e-book to use as my guide. Things were going smooth as I was reading and doing the exercises but I realized it's really eating up most of my time. So I skipped the training, identified the controls that will be used, read the documentation, and even googled some code.

Following a beginner's book is good because it lays out all the foundation that you need. However, there are instances that I feel that my learning can be faster when I study some code which already does the functionality that I want(ex. code that inserts to a ListView with checkboxes). It's good if I cannot understand the code at first because that's when the reading comes in. So I get to learn about the control and other classes that were used and at the same time, I am able to accomplish a task.

Why not use something like Xamarin[^]? Would avoid having to learn a new language, just a new framework. If your buddy is serious about the app, they can put the couple bucks towards it. Depending on what the app is (if its a game), you may be able to get away with something free, like Unity3D[^] which does scripting in C#.

Its $299 for indie (micro-isv). You may sway him in saying that developing a code base for Android can be immediately ported over to iOS and Windows Phone to vastly expand his market. Cornering yourself to Android leaves out a lot of market share on other platforms, and if he decides to move over to those platforms later, its going to be a painful re-basing of the code.

Don't let him make a poor decision because its cheaper, things like that end up costing more than you think in the end. There's a lot to be said to be able to provide your app on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone without extra effort.

I agree with you. But given that all his projects are Java-based applications, it may not be feasible at the moment. Maybe in the future when he is ready to accept mobile app development on other platforms, I will remind him again.

Why do you think the articles here are so important and popular, almost all the subjects are covered by MSDN and other doco sources. The same thing described and built in a different way by a different person may just click with the reader and he get some real value out of it.

The exception to the is the Yet Another (code generator, DAL, serialiser etc) these have been done to death and more articles only add to the confusion and reduces the chances of finding the right response from a search.

There is an unwritten (and, ,therefore,unfortunately, often-times unread) rule that prior to beginning an article on any subject, one should read every other article on the subject before deciding if one has something more to say - or at least that one is going to be saying the same thing in a significantly different manner.

I must admit one of my articles, adding filtering to a DGV turned out to be YA, it had been done by many others before me in basically the same way.

I find that the introduction of the Tip/Trick format did for my article writing, that and the fact that I've gone back to learning with the change to Silverlight and don't feel I have anything new to offer in that arena yet.

It looks like we will have to move to another presentation layer before I even get the depth of knowledge required to produce something useful.

I hate to say it, but there's more good jobs in mobile (droid or ios) than in .net these days. I'm in the same position as you, though the project I'm working on is personal, not going to market. I've done java in college and only a little since.

I like it better, but my experience is limited. I never really cared for Eclipse. I can't speak in terms of performance either. One thing, if you are following tutorials closely, some things may have to be done differently (screens are a little different, etc).

I had something similar happen. I installed Windows 7 with a key (not the one on the bottom, because that's for a different version of Windows) and it said it was invalid. So I rang the automated system and it all got sorted. Yet the same key I used to install 7 in a VM, perhaps that's why it said it was invalid when I tried on real hardware.

I suspect it has something to do with it beein an OEM License. The license gets invalidated to prevent the installation of the OS on multiple computers. I don't know however why the automated phone system works

I haven't installed that many copies of windows 7, but Windows XP had some weird rules on when you had to call and talk to someone or it would just activate. Sometimes installing the same copy, same code on the same pc multiple times in a short period would make you call. Never understood why nothing ever changed.

After years of refusing to upgrade my internet connection box because I am not a new customer British Telecom have suddenly decided to give me a shiny new Home Hub 3.0 without me asking for it. All I did ask them to do was to stop restricting my connection speed to 320Kbps because after 4 days I was more than a little fed up. They blamed my existing box, offered the free replacement, and then removed the restriction from the line 20 minutes later

Anyway so now I have the new box and I wonder whether I should whack it in and use it? The difference will be I will no longer have a DMZ, a full blown PC running software I can monitor and control, sitting between my nice LAN and the bandit county of the internet.
Can I really trust the little black box to keep me safe as well as connected?
Any thoughts or relevant experience?

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)